Browsing the German palaeo-blogs (yes, there are a few really good ones) I just came across an entry at Gunnar Ries’ Mente et Malleo that deals with a paper published in the Journal of Geology. A paper that certainly makes my shortlist of Ten Best Papers ever, and may well be the funniest thing you can find in peer-reviewed print. It is rather short, and appears to be a reply to an article showing the authors of the reply wrong on something.

and here it is:

Mwahahahaha!!!!!!!

but this is more than just a flippant reply, this is in fact a bunch of successful scientists publicly – and not in a newspaper but in the very place where later generations of scientists will go look – stating that yes, indeed, our previous publication was wrong! That takes a lot of character.